When a Shared ID Leads to a Grim Predicament

We live, it has been said many times, in the era of oversharing. Sometimes this produces awkward situations. Other times, it produces something much worse.

Q. My husband, son and I share the same Apple ID, which means every book, app and song we buy is charged to the same credit card and shared by our devices courtesy of iCloud, the company’s cloud-based storage system. As a result, we don’t have to buy three copies of everything.

It worked well, until March of last year. Then disaster struck.

Somehow, default settings changed during a system update, and iMessages between my husband and me started appearing, for the first time, on my son’s iPad. Unaware, my husband and I had an argument, via texts, about moderating our use of marijuana. Our son has a learning disability that requires him to use his iPad at school as an augmentative communication tool, so his teachers got a look at that marijuana argument. They immediately reported my husband and me to the child protection division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources.

Two weeks later, a rep from D.H.R. knocked on our door. She questioned all three of our children privately. She asked me if I feed and bathe my children. She required that my husband and I submit to a drug test the following day, the first of several over the next few months.

I assure you, my husband and I are neither neglectful nor abusive.

After three months of unhappy and confusing dealings with D.H.R. — which included many unreturned phone calls and a lot of anxiety — we received a letter stating the accusations of child abuse and neglect against us were “indicated,” which translates to “true” in D.H.R.’s terminology. We had the right to an administrative review and a month later, after I wrote a six-page letter defending ourselves, we were cleared by the D.H.R. But both my name and my husband’s name are in what is ominously called “the system,” where they will remain for five years.

This whole episode was traumatizing, to say the least. And it raises a question: Does Apple really think about these kinds of potential consequences?

Name withheld by request

Birmingham, Ala.

A. The Haggler’s first thought upon reading this email was that it could be a hoax. But our letter writer had saved all of the correspondence from D.H.R., which she scanned and shared.

This is a true story.

The Haggler’s second thought was that this sounded like the sort of tale Franz Kafka would have written had he lived in the age of cloud computing.

The Haggler’s third thought: If this happened to our unnamed mother, it has happened to others. A quick frisk of the Internet found similar stories and an article in The Telegraph, the British newspaper, with the headline “Apple iCloud Sparks Divorce Cases.” In it, an English divorce lawyer discussed new clients he’d met courtesy of Apple software. They included the wife of a guy in his early 40s who, during a night of revelry with some friends, had downloaded the hookup dating app Tinder, contacted a few women and shared some saucy photos over Snapchat. All of the messages and photos were received by the wife, who subsequently filed for divorce.

It would be wiser for these people, and others in similar circumstances, to have their own Apple IDs. But that can get expensive. Imagine a family of five, in which everyone is buying repeat copies of the same app or film, just because they’re worried their private messages will suddenly become family fodder. Shouldn’t there be a way for people to share an Apple account but get a unique Apple ID, allowing them to buy one version of the same app, without risking a catastrophic loss of privacy?

Yes, there should. And let the record reflect that mere days after the Haggler contacted Apple, the company cried “uncle.”

“Uncle!” it cried, at the top of its lungs.

Well, not “uncle” literally. What it actually said, through a spokeswoman, is that the company would soon make it easier for families “to communicate and share purchases, photos and calendars within the same household. Family members can browse and download each other’s iTunes, iBooks or App Store purchases. Up to six members can participate, each with their own Apple ID.”

You see? Total and immediate victory, ladies and gentlemen. It’s called total and immediate victory. If there is a more vivid demonstration of the Haggler’s juice, the Haggler is unaware of it.

Wait just a minute there, you pompous charade of a consumer advocate, the Haggler can hear you say. This change you describe is a feature called Family Sharing and it was in the works long before you contacted the company. It was announced last week at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, in San Francisco. It will be part of the new version of Apple’s operating system being released in the fall.

That quote above was not prompted by you — it’s from a news release. By coincidence, you called just as the company was unveiling a solution to the problem you wanted solved. You need to take credit for that? How petty can you be?

The Haggler does not appreciate your tone, dear readers. It’s judgmental. But to address your two questions above, the answers, for the record, are “yes” and “very.”

EMAIL: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Shared ID Leads to a Grim Predicament. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe